Wole Soyinka
with the cause of Truth, Justice and Humanity. Where else in modern
African literature would one find both the tenor and the substance of the
following assertions in the section ofThe Man Diedappropriately titled
“A letter to Compatriots”:
I recognized...thatImovedlongagobeyondcompromise, that this book is
now, and that only such things should be left out which might imperil those on
whom true revolution within the country depends. My judgment alone must
serve in such matters,and my experience which, it strikes me more and more, is unique
among the fifty million people of my country() (My emphasis)
The stance articulated in this passage may be read as the expression
of an extreme self-absorption caused by Soyinka’s long incarceration in
solitary confinement. Or it can be read as a radical insistence that individ-
ual moral autonomy expressed by privileging personal perceptions and
intuitions in a period of war-induced dictatorship matters profoundly
and should unapologetically be asserted and defended. A third possible
reading of course is that these two interpretations intersect. But what-
ever one makes of it, the vital fact remains that Soyinka did not adopt
this stance on the uniqueness of his experience and intuitions in a fit
of absent-mindedness, and that in adopting it he was placing himself,
and the writings born of that stance, at great risk. Definitely, from the
number of highly placed political and military figures named and fe-
rociously savaged in the book, we know what personal risks the book
entailed for its author. The ban which was for a time placed on the sale
of the book in Nigeria, and the long period of estrangement between
Soyinka and erstwhile friends and confreres in the community of the
country’s literary intelligentsia are also a dimension of the personal risks
provoked by the uncompromising moral and spiritual authority claimed
by the author-protagonist as the ambiguous and bitter harvest of his
unique experiences among his countrymen and women.The artistic,
ideological and ethical risks in the particular tenor of the radical stance
of the author-narrator in this work calls for careful analysis.
The very title of the prison memoir,The Man Died, enormously com-
plicates Soyinka’s uncompromising privileging of his individual moral
vision in the book. For we know that the incarcerated writer survived. An
unfortunate broadcast journalist, Segun Sowemimo, whose death from
medical complications arising from a brutal beating ordered by a mili-
tary governor in General Gowon’s regime, supplied the title for the book.
What Sowemimo’s death has to do with Soyinka’s incarceration, or with
the thousands murdered in the genocidal slaughter of Igbo residents of
Northern Nigeria in May and September, or with the million killed